At Home with Tech

If there are multiple versions of your personal brand online, maybe it’s time to bring it all together. Here’s how to do that with a Bio Site.

In addition to my At Home with Tech blog, which I host on WordPress, I also have a more professional presence at barrettlester.com. I built that website using Squarespace. (Of course, I’ve also got LinkedIn for my professional life.)

My thinking has always been to have two parallel but separate paths for my online branding. One for weekdays… the other for weekends.

There is Only One True Version of You
That said, I’m acutely aware that there really isn’t separation when it comes to anyone’s personal brand. So, I’m mindful to ensure my home technology blog stories as a dad are complementary to my professional presence as corporate video production leader.

And whether it’s LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or TikTok, everything we post online molds our identity. So why even try to separate it?

Instead, perhaps we should try to bring it all together with the links in one place. That unification is what Squarespace has offered me.

Build your Bio Site
In fact, Squarespace has been bugging me for quite a while to do this by setting up something called a Bio Site. It’s a free option that creates a new mobile-first, one-page website where you can aggregate all of your social media links and website links.

Think of it as a link-centric, ‘everything you’ profile. (And yes, there are other bio services out there.)

But since Squarespace’s free offer was right in front of me, I decided to go ahead and stand up my new ‘All Barrett’ destination at biosites.com:

My new Bio Site is bio.site/barrettlester.

My Bio Site is Live!
You can see that I’m still organizing my existence into two pieces. My work life is on the top, and my home life inhabits the bottom half the page. (I’ll continue to work on better integrating a more holistic identity.)

Yes, my Bio Site was easy to create. Yes, the design is flexible. Yes, I can change and add to it as I go along.

But do I really need this?

The Total You
Well, I can certainly add the link to my email signature. It’s also intended to be useful in places like Instagram, where you can only post one clickable link.

It feels a bit like a digital business card, but it’s really more of a digital ‘life’ card to share.

It’s everything that’s you.

Bring It Together
I like the simplicity. It’s one-stop shopping.

Sure, you can unify your online identity in other ways, but if you’ve already scattered your existence across the web, a Bio Site can be a good way to bring it all together!